Alex Goldman

Bring more of their marketing people in-house and use private marketplaces wherever possible.

There's so much money in this ecosystem that's getting wasted on middlemen, and they have very little incentive to ethically manage your money or accurately audit their own work.

So fuck them.

As for the consumer side, that is the side where someone like Marcus might encounter an AI obituary for someone he cares about, Claire had this to say.

When we followed up with Marcus, we were initially a little worried that he'd be disappointed that the AI obituary scam turned out to be a pretty run-of-the-mill clickbait operation.

But when we started to explain the digital advertising ecosystem that gave birth to this run-of-the-mill clickbait operation, he enthusiastically and correctly pointed out that, in fact, there was a syndicate after all.

And the truth is, we really only scratched the surface of this particular rabbit hole.

But now that it's on our radar, I suspect we're going to be spending a lot more time digging into this particular patch of the Internet.

Well, Marcus, thank you so much for coming to us with a question.

And, oh, wait, there is one more thing.

So, you know how at the beginning of the episode I said that I'd essentially lost the tools I needed to track down website scammers?

Well, in the course of investigating the story, we connected with a journalist named Craig Silverman, who is an expert on digital deception.

And initially, the plan was that we were going to talk about the world of scam sites and ad fraud.

And we definitely did that.

But also, I sent him a list of the websites that ran AI obituaries for Marcus's friend.

And Craig took it upon himself to track down one of the scammers behind these sites.

This scammer, who you just heard on the phone a moment ago, initially agreed to an interview with us.

But unfortunately, at the last minute, he ghosted us and he blocked our number.

But next week on the Premium Feed, Craig Silverman is going to give us step-by-step instructions explaining the tools he used and how he used them to find this guy.

So yeah, hope to see you then.